Foul-Weather Friends: Reinterpreting Jewish–Christian Urban Interaction in the Final Decades of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth

On 3 may 1790 the civil-military commission of Lublin voivodeship adjudicated a contract dispute between the town magistracy and the Jewish community of Lublin over the question of quartering soldiers for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth’s rapidly growing army. According to the suit, the Lublin Jews had promised the previous spring to contribute 1,000 zlotys per annum to the town treasury in lieu of billeting their allotment of 70 soldiers. Unhappily, Lublin received 233 more soldiers than anticipated, and, in response, the magistracy allocated the majority of the surplus, 170 recruits, to the extramural ‘Jewish town’. Although the commission found the magistracy in violation of the agreement and decreed immediate new accommodation for 92 of the soldiers housed in Jewish homes, a second hearing in October of 1791 revealed that Lublin’s magistracy had thus far failed to comply, and the commission ordered the prompt transfer of the soldiers from the Jewish town under penalty of legal prosecution of the town magistrates.¹

Quarrels between Jews and their Christian neighbours punctuated small-town life in pre-modern eastern Europe, but disputes like this serve as a reminder that these confrontations did not necessarily arise from some simmering cauldron of ethno-religious hostility. Historians of Poland–Lithuania have frequently viewed the dynamics of Jewish–Christian interaction through such dramatic details as the escalation of ritual murder trials in the eighteenth century, the Judaeophobic rhetoric of Christian polemics, and the Jewish communities’ own professions of insecurity, leading to the conclusion that a broadly shared religious enmity and mutual antipathy poisoned neighbourly relations.² In many cases, though, contacts between urban Christians and Jews revolved around concrete and prosaic concerns connected with the ambiguous powers and duties of both groups, a fact obscured by the rhetorically charged language of polemics and petitions designed to win sympathy from higher authorities. As legally separate estates, distinguished by particularistic rights, privileges, and burdens in a world of overlapping and conflicting political jurisdictions, Jews and Christians pursued similar aims, the realization of which required a kind of continuous intergroup negotiation paralleled in the interaction of Christian burghers with the other urban estates.

Recently scholars have begun to challenge the older picture of incessant religious conflict in small-town eastern Europe. Adam Teller has argued that hostility and violence in Polish towns were only ‘one part of a broader relationship’, and studies of Jewish debts to Church institutions suggest that more complex forms of interaction existed behind the veil of confessionally charged rhetoric. Further, Eugene Avrutin’s argument that Jews and Christians in the Russian empire shared a common legal and political culture built around shared institutions and expectations offers a useful approach for reconsidering urban interaction in the commonwealth.³ Building on this foundation, this chapter employs an array of remonstrances and complaints from town residents to central and local authorities in the late eighteenth century in order to place Jewish–Christian negotiation within the wider context of interaction between estates in small towns. Petitions to royal officials from town residents have a long pedigree, but the number of missives from town groupings to the central government increased dramatically after the election of King Stanisław August Poniatowski (r. 1764–96). A proponent of enlightened government, the new king, along with his allies in the parliament, sponsored reforms intended to promote economic development and rational order in the towns. These measures rearranged the balance of rights and privileges of town groupings, provoking a sluice of petitions, protests, and manoeuvres, many of which illuminate, if only briefly, the internal dynamics of an individual town.⁴

A broad comparison of these often mutually contradictory petitions reveals that conflicts within small towns frequently revolved around concrete and longstanding points of contention, usually involving issues of jurisdiction, privilege, and burden-sharing. In other words, many grievances had little to do with religious, ethnic, or class animosity, involving instead competition between legally distinct groups for resources and authority in a dynamic of shifting power relations. Occasionally, the petitions reveal evidence of intergroup...